Link Building

Why do Link Building? Search Engines see links to your web site as a vote!

If Search Engines see links to your web site they see it as almost a vote to your web site.. But it’s not as simple as, I’ve got a link so I’m one link closer to getting a better search engine position. There are ranking factors on the link itself, how good is the PageRank? How reputable is the web site? How new is the web site? How similar is the web site compared to the one it is linking to?

All of these factors will determine how precious a link is to your web site. For example, if my web site was a directory and I had a link from www.dmoz.org, I know that I would see a major increase in search engine rankings to my web site, why? DMOZ is the biggest, most well known, highest page rank directory (similar/relevant web site!) there is and not only this but their content is also used on many other websites.

The next few articles will be on the topic of Link Building (or Generating Links) which is an important part of promoting your web site in the Search Engines. The main aspects we will be looking at is the best places to obtain links, the type of links and how the links should be setup. Links are seen as important by Search Engines because they consider that the links are promoting, recommending or voting for a web site (so your web site must be good!).

Follow these general principles of Building Links:

Quantity – The more links you have to your web site the better (keep reading, quality is more important!).

Quality – One quality link could effectively equal fifty or more average links so it’s best to get quality links. Try getting links from:

Similar Web Sites – Sites that rank on the same keywords that you want to rank better on. These will obviously be related content and will help your rankings greatly.

High PageRank – Higher PageRank web sites will be more valuable than lower PageRank web sites.

Wikipedia – If your web site is on a topic that is found in Wikipedia then you should go to the discussion page of the topic and suggest adding a link to your web site. This would be a quality link and it would also produce visitors that visit the page. It can’t hurt to try! The other option of Wikipedia is to create your own Wikipedian page (as it may rank in the search engines) and as long as you’ve put it all together you will have a good chance of keeping the link in place.

Directories – Read the article on Submitting to Directories.

Articles and Blogs – Read the article on Blogs and Articles.

Competition – Check how many links your competitors have to find yourself a goal. Search for link:domain.com in Yahoo to give you the most accurate amount of links.

Link Placement – Consider where you get links. Links are more valuable when amongst other text (non link text) and not in link lists or link pages.

Anchor Text (Link Text) – Vary anchor text (aka link text), this will show that the links are “natural” and do not appear to be illegitimate. The words that are in anchor text are seen by search engines as keywords or phrases describing a web site. Read Keyword Placements for more information.

Time – Do not flood your web site with a lot of links at once. If your web site is new it can be dangerous to get a lot of links within a short period of time. If your web site was to suddenly get 500 links in a week, Search Engines can get suspicious and may penalise your Search Engine rankings.

Remember that Link Building needs to be done over time but with a combination of link building and optimization each page on your web site over months will ensure higher Search Engines results for your web site.